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The Bucket List



Only a man with too much time on his hands and maybe too little hope in his heart will ponder about his bucket list when in the prime of his life. A bucket list, for those who do not know, is a list of things that you want to do before you die. It originated from its more well known cousin 'to kick the bucket'.

Me, I thought about it when I had neither much time in my hands nor any lack of hope in my heart. The thought was by all means intentional because what one wants to do before one dies is perhaps what one really wants to do in life, but never thought possible once life started 'doing' him. Though the greatest wonder about our world, despite all the efforts of every mathematician and scientist to model every possible event and outcome, is that one can never really predict what is going to happen tomorrow. It is this unpredictability and how we dealt with it that has both made men and broken others.

And so when my friends asked me about what was in my bucket list, I told them I wanted to travel, see the world. Simple reason. The world is a really beautiful place that it would be a pity if one were to die without daring to venture out and see and feel for himself the beauty one had been missing out.

Though now that some of the alcohol is out of my head and some reason has sauntered in again, I am not so sure if my dying moments is one that should be spent in a place I barely know or one where I began my life in.

For me, that would be India. It is one place I loathe to go back now because it is not the same place I left more than 10 years ago. The people are different, the buildings are different, it is anything but an saddening vision of a country where technology, westernisation and money are rapidly displacing culture, community and family as the foundations of the country.

Though, as any man grows old, the call of the land he was born on will always be too hard to resist. Maybe it is nostalgia, maybe it is the numerous books and films I have watched about Indian men, who toil away on foreign lands to eventually return to their homeland. Whatever the reason, I guess I will skip all that travelling and just return home. The people may be different, the buildings may be different but it is only there that I can relive the dreams, hopes and memories when I first stepped into this world. And that would be certainly worth reliving before one's final moments.

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